As Lala continues its path toward Hawaii’s Big Island after strengthening into a hurricane, concerns are rising for the region’s aging housing stock.
“We have a lot older inventory on all of the islands,” said Roseann Freitas, chief executive of the Building Industry Association of Hawaii.
While there are newer structures on the Big Island, older buildings will be more at risk of damage from the heavy rains, fierce winds and potential flooding that hurricanes can produce. The median age of a house on the Big Island is 37 years old, according to a report from the University of Hawaii.
Older homes, Ms. Freitas said, were typically built with single-wall construction as opposed to double-wall construction, which is more commonly found across the mainland of the United States.
“We don’t have summer, winter, spring and fall, right? We have summer and summer,” she said. “They’ve never had to really worry about insulation and all of that when they were building these homes over the decades, because the weather was very consistent.”
Homes built in the years after Hurricane Iniki made landfall in 1992 on Kauai were required to have a strong hardware connection from the roof to the foundation, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. Those built in 2010 or later were required to be able to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.
Dennis Hwang of the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, who is a co-author of “The Homeowner’s Handbook to Prepare for Natural Hazards,” said on Friday that double-walled houses, which have an exterior wall and an interior wall with two-by-four studs in the middle, “should do OK” during the storm, but it was unclear how the single-wall homes would fare.
“They’re not as strong,” he said. “And we really won’t know how they perform with this event because we don’t know how strong this event will be.”
Hawaii’s high cost of housing and construction has prevented homeowners from updating and strengthening older structures.
“It costs so much to get to today’s code and make it more resilient,” Ms. Freitas said. Once construction deals with walls, she added, anything touching the wall has to comply with codes.
Taping windows and bringing in heavy or large items that can become projectiles in strong winds can help, Ms. Freitas said, but the important thing is to keep an eye on the storm and to know when you should evacuate to a shelter.
Hawaii County announced it was opening several shelters as of 6 p.m. on Friday.
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